Engels' Notes

*1 It is much
easier, along with the unthinking mob à la Karl Vogt, to assail the
old philosophy of nature than to appreciate its historical significance. It
contains a great deal of nonsense and fantasy but not more than the
unphilosophical theories of the empirical natural scientists contemporary with
that philosophy, and that there was also in it much that was sensible and
rational began to be perceived after the theory of evolution became widespread.
Haeckel was therefore fully justified in recognising the merits of Treviranus
and Oken. In his primordial slime and primordial vesicle Oken put forward as a
biological postulate what was in fact subsequently discovered as protoplasm and
cell. As far as Hegel is specifically concerned, he is in many respects head
and shoulders above his empiricist contemporaries, who thought that they had
explained all unexplained phenomena when they had endowed them with some force
or power — the force of gravity, the power of buoyancy, the power of
electrical contact, etc. — or where this would not do, with some unknown
substance: the substance of light, of heat, of electricity, etc. The imaginary
substances have now been pretty well discarded, but the power humbug against
which Hegel fought still pops up gaily, for example, as late as 1869 in
Helmholtz's Innsbruck lecture (Helmholtz, Populäre Vorlesungen, Issue
II, 1871, p. 190). In contrast to the deification of Newton which was handed
down from the French of the eighteenth century, and the English heaping of
honours and wealth on Newton, Hegel brought out the fact that Kepler, whom
Germany allowed to starve, was the real founder of the modern mechanics of the
celestial bodies, and that the Newtonian law of gravitation was already
contained in all three of Kepler's laws, in the third law even explicitly. What
Hegel proves by a few simple equations in his Naturphilosophie,
§ 270 and Addenda (Hegel's Werke, 1842, Vol. 7, pp. 98 and
113 to 115), appears again as the outcome of the most recent mathematical
mechanics in Gustav Kirchhoff's Vorlesungen uber mathematische Physik,
2nd ea., Leipzig, 1877, p. 10 and in essentially the same simple mathematical
form as had first been developed by Hegel. The natural philosophers stand in
the same relation to consciously dialectical natural science as the utopians to
modern communism.

*2 Since I wrote the
above it would seem already to have been confirmed. According to the latest
researches carried out with more exact apparatus by Mendeleyev and Boguski, all
true gases show a variable relation between pressure and volume; the
coefficient of expansion for hydrogen, at all the pressures so far applied, has
been positive (that is, the diminution of volume was slower than the increase
of pressure); in the case of atmospheric air and the other gases examined there
is for each a zero point of pressure, so that with pressure below this point
the coefficient is positive, and with pressure above this point their
coefficient is negative. So Boyle's law, which has always hitherto been usable
for practical purposes, will have to be supplemented by a whole series of
special laws. (We also know now — in 1885 — that there are no
"true" gases at all. They have all been reduced to a liquid form.) [46]

*3 This derivation
of the modern ideas of equality from the economic conditions of bourgeois
society was first demonstrated by Marx in Capital.

*4 This is already
perfectly well known to the Prussian General Staff. "The basis of
warfare is primarily the economic way of life of the peoples in
general" said herrn Max Jahns, a captain of the General Staff, in a scientific
lecture (Kölnische Zeitung, April 20, 1876, p 3)

*5 The perfecting of
the latest product of modern industry for use in naval warfare, the
self-propelled torpedo, seems likely to bring this to pass; it would mean that
the smallest torpedo boat would be superior to the most powerful armoured
warship. (It should be borne in mind that the above was written in 1878 [81].)

*6 And not even
this. Rodbertus says (Sociale Briefe Letter 2, p. 59): "Rent according
to this" (his) "theory, is all income obtained without personal labour, solely
on the ground of possession."

*8 It is hardly
necessary in this connection to point out that, even if the form of
appropriation remains the same, the character of the appropriation is
just as much revolutionised as production is by the changes described above. It
is, of course, a very different matter whether I appropriate to myself my own
product or that of another. Note in passing that wage-labour, which contains
the whole capitalistic mode of production in embryo, is very ancient; in a
sporadic, scattered form it existed for centuries alongside slave-labour. But
the embryo could duly develop into the capitalistic mode of production only
when the necessary historical preconditions had been furnished.

*9The Condition
of the Working-Class in England, p. 109.

*10 I say "have
to". For only when the means of production and distribution have
actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and
when, therefore, the taking them over by the state has become
economically inevitable, only then — even if it is the state of
today that effects this — is there an economic advance, the attainment of
another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society
itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for state-ownership of industrial
establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and
again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares
all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic.
Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is
socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders
of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial
reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any
economic compulsion, took over for the state the chief Prussian lines, simply
to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the
railway employees as voting cattle for the government, and especially to create
for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes —
this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly,
consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, [116] the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even
the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions.

*11 A few figures
may serve to give an approximate idea of the enormous expansive force of the
modern means of production, even under capitalist pressure. According to Mr.
Giffen, [118] the total wealth of Great
Britain and Ireland amounted, in round numbers, in

As an instance of the squandering of means of production and of
products during a crisis, the total loss in the German iron industry
alone, in the recent crisis {of 1873-78} was given at the second German
Industrial Congress (Berlin, February 21, 1878) as 455,000,000 marks.

*12 The
"under-consumption" explanation of crises originated with Sismondi, and in his
exposition it still had a certain meaning. Rodbertus took it from Sismondi, and
Herr Dühring has in turn copied it, in his usual vulgarising fashion, from
Rodbertus.

*13 The TRUCK
SYSTEM in England, also well known in Germany, is that system under which the
manufacturers themselves run shops and compel their workers to buy their goods
there.

*14 It may be noted
in passing that the part played by labour-notes in Owen's communist society is
completely unknown to Herr Dühring. He knows these notes — from Sargant
— only in so far as they figure in the labour exchange bazaars [123] which of course were failures, inasmuch as
they were attempts by means of the direct exchange of labour to pass from
existing society into communist society.

*15 As long ago as
1844 I stated that the above-mentioned balancing of useful effects and
expenditure of labour on making decisions concerning production was all that
would be left, in a communist society, of the politico-economic concept of
value. (Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, p. 95) The scientific
justification for this statement, however, as can be seen, was made possible
only by Marx's Capital.

*16 This twofold
character assumed later on by the divinities was one of the causes of the
subsequently widespread confusion of mythologies — a cause which
comparative mythology has overlooked, as it pays attention exclusively to their
character as reflections of the forces of nature. Thus in some Germanic tribes
the war-god is called Tyr (Old Nordic) or Zio (Old High German) and so
corresponds to the Greek Zeus, Latin Jupiter for Diespiter; in other Germanic
tribes, Er, Eor, corresponds therefore to the Greek Ares, Latin Mars.